Thoughts, Words, and Humanism

Yet another Rabbit article. I don't usually pay attention to what happens on campus- I never did at Rutgers and that hasn't changed here- but occasionally you do come across some drama that's worth opining about. Some writer for the paper got slack from the LGBT alliance on campus for using the word 'gay' in a pejorative fashion in a recent issue. A lot of other writers were up in arms about it- freespeech and all that. I decided to offer my two cents, as seen below:

***

Thoughts, Words, and Humanism

R.H. Langan

I am commenting on a controversy that broke out regarding a certain article in a previous issue of this paper. I’ll just cut straight to the point.

I am an open supporter of LGBT and queer beliefs. This is basically because I am a humanist; all people ought to expect certain inalienable rights, even if our governments selectively removes them. Furthermore the bigotry towards queers is, no matter what way you want to define it, is usually a product of misplaced masculine insecurities and fear of what is foreign to us. The idea to deny marriage to someone because of their sex or gender is as foolish and primordial as was the reluctance of allowing blacks and white to marry in America up until 1970. I see little difference. And to deny that queers, women- hell, even men in a less unjust sense- are all prisoners of certain social expectations is something that I think is hard to deny from a psychoanalytical perspective.

And yet we can argue, and to a certain extent I agree, that when it comes to political correctness, that there is a problem with focusing on language alone. Censoring words doesn’t change thought; in fact it may merely muddle the quality of it and keeps the dirtier residue on a more subversive level. And do words have anything other than a neutral in of themselves? It is the motives behind them that determine the moral value. As the late George Carlin said, the quality of our thoughts can only be equal to the quality of our language. What if words are just words? Then what we instead need to do is improve thought.

So this is precisely why I understand and agree with the anger brought on by the flippant use of the word ‘gay’. Not because of the word isolated in of itself, but really because the offhand use of gay in a derogatory fashion still reveals a deficiency in quality of thinking, an ignorance of consideration for the decency of others. And if we are to indeed achieve a more equal world for all, it is crucial that we enrich our thinking to improve both our speech and actions. Then perhaps those inalienable rights will not be a privilege reserved for white straight males, but a birthright for us all.